In my last post here I explained the benefits of email marketing campaigns and why it’s vital that you consider emails as a way to build a relationship with your customers and ultimately sell them your product, service and solution.

In this post I will detail how you can make the most of your campaigns. Let’s start!

Nurture your list

The first thing you need to have in mind is that your goal is to nurture your list (email sequences). You want to create and build the relationship that will move your audience deeper into your particular company’s customer journey.

We do this by creating email sequences that will frame the customer in the right state of mind and opinion towards our product.

But before we even think about writing the first email in the sequence, you must start by properly segmenting your list. Keeping in mind that you can’t please everybody and that you can’t catch many types of fish with the same bait, you have to divide your audience into groups of people who are looking for the same solution and who are in the same step in the customer journey in your company.

You wouldn’t send the same email to someone who has repeatedly bought from you and to someone who came through an ad and just opted in, would you?

You can’t send the same email to everybody, because they need nurturing in a different way. This is why you should avoid broadcasting an email campaign. Unless you feel that everybody in your list must know about the message, you must personalize messages to the different audiences (segments) that you serve.

The better you segment your audience, the better information you will gather from them

Finding out what worked or didn’t work, will help you make future decisions. Your segmentation goes a long way.

Once your segments are done, you can start thinking about the email itself.

When you are preparing an email for your audience, think that they have willingly consented to receive information from you. And you have to keep it that way.

With this in mind, what we want to accomplish every time that we send an email is that our customers are excited to see an email from us.

You don’t want them to see your name in their inbox and roll their eyes while thinking: “these people again” or “they never send me anything interesting”. So you have to be sure that what you send is of value to them.

How do you get them excited about an email? Sometimes it’s the content that they are expecting: maybe it’s an order that they have placed, an item that they have ordered, or maybe because you pack your emails with extremely interesting information so they’re looking forward to opening it instead of going like: “here comes again” or “I’m so bored” or “this is spam”. So this is the goal of every one of your emails.

Clean your list from time to time

One final tip is to clean your list from time to time. I’ve known way too many companies and entrepreneurs who are reluctant to do this, but let me tell you that it is necessary. There is something worse than having an unresponsive audience: having the wrong audience!

Once in a while, clean up your contacts. There are some people who will never unsubscribe from your list, but will never open or care for your emails. So why keep them? When somebody is unresponsive they might as well leave your list.

How do you spring-clean your email list? Create a campaign for those who haven’t opened your emails in a while, and ask them directly. “Do you hate me?” Or “this is goodbye” are a couple of the subject lines I’ve seen being used for this purpose. You just need to find out whether certain people still want to hear from you or not.

So like I said: nothing worse than nurturing the wrong audience! It’s better to have a smaller but very engaged audience instead of a large, unresponsive one.

Of course, you don’t need to do all this manually. There are systems that you can put in place in order to automate all this. Let me know if you’re interested in knowing how you can save a lot of time automating your campaigns and I will write about it.

Keep in touch!

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